James Murray Mason

James Murray Mason (3 November 1798-28 April 1871) was a member of the US House of Representatives (D-VA 15) from 4 March 1837 to 3 March 1839 (succeeding Edward Lucas and preceding William Lucas) and a US Senator from 21 January 1847 to 28 March 1861 (succeeding Isaac S. Pennybacker and preceding Waitman T. Willey).

Biography
James Murray Mason was born in Washington DC in 1798, and he became a lawyer in Virginia in 1820. He attended the 1829-30 constitutional convention and served in the House of Delegates before becoming a Jacksonian member of the US House of Representatives in 1837, serving one term. In 1847, he was appointed to fill a vacancy in the US Senate, and he read aloud the dying Senator John C. Calhoun's speech to the US Congress, warning them of secession if the American South was not granted equal representation. He drafted the second Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and investigated John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, and, in 1861, he was expelled from the Senate for supporting the Confederacy. From 1862 to 1865, he represented the CSA in Britain (having briefly been detained by the Union in the Trent Affair), and he lived in Canada from 1865 to 1868, when he returned to Alexandria, Virginia. He died in 1871.